Zen Leadership: The Toughest (Best) Business Decision I Ever Made

August Turak
, ContributorI write about service and selflessness: the secret to success.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

He cared deeply, lived carelessly, and couldn’t care less, and he died in the same obscurity into which he was born.Yet he remains the greatest leader and most remarkable man I have ever met. Everything that is best in me I owe largely to him.

August Turak's Zen Teacher

In 1973 I dropped out of college and took a job jockeying a jack hammer in order to study full time under a West Virginia hillbilly, family man, house painter, and Zen Master hovering just above the poverty line in Wheeling, West Virginia. A poster child for the anti-guru, he claimed no lineage, accepted no money, and I was his first student. He cared deeply, lived carelessly, and couldn’t care less, and he died in the same obscurity into which he was born. Yet he remains the greatest leader and most remarkable man I have ever met. Everything that is best in me I owe largely to him.

One day I approached him eager for his secret to success. What was the single most important thing he did in his life?

“It wasn’t what I did,” he replied without hesitation, “it was what I didn’t do.” Then he walked away leaving me baffled and a little miffed at what felt a lot like a rebuff…

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What is the sound of one hand clapping? How can success arise from not doing rather than doing? Riddles like these, called “koans” in Zen Buddhism, have long baffled the Western mind. Steeped for millennia in the Aristotelian logic that insists that the truth is either A or ~ A, Zen has long been dismissed as little more than mystical double talk by western philosophy and science. But recent advances in the science behind creative thinking and problem solving should be changing that misconception.

Only recently have terms like creative destruction, controlled chaos, coopetition, creative destruction, fuzzy logic, breaking the frame, jumping outside the system, disruptive technologies, and thinking outside the box entered the lexicon of business. These terms trickled down from science, and they all try to capture the essentially paradoxical nature of the universe. They suggest that overcoming our scientific, political, and economic challenges will increasingly rely on mastering a whole new mode of thinking: the same paradoxical thinking that Zen mastered 1500 years ago.

Technically, thinking outside the box relies on what psychologists describe as “lateral” or “divergent” thinking, and thinking laterally or divergently is highly correlated with creativity. Rather than converging on a single “back of the book” answer in a linear step by step way, divergent learning teaches people how to ask new and exciting questions: questions that disrupt assumptions and shatter the frame of complacency that produces a “business as usual” mentality.

Until relatively recently things rarely changed. Without the benefit of Moore’s Law, a Roman soldier looked pretty much the same in 400 A.D as he did in 400 B.C. The little change that occurred was gradual, incremental, and evolutionary. Success relied on efficiency rather than creativity, and Aristotelian logic is great at efficiency. But Einstein’s revolution changed all that. Today, change is the only constant and the rate of change keeps changing at an ever increasing rate.

Managing change has meant a value shift away from evolutionary business models aimed at efficiency toward revolutionary models that rely on innovation and creativity. The adage that no man is an island is doubly true for business, and our only choice is to lead change or fall victim to it. And leading change means doing a better job at thinking divergently.

Divergent thinking argues that it is not what we don’t know that is standing in our way, but more insidiously, all those things we are so damn sure we alreadyknow. The CEO of a rapidly growing startup put it succinctly, “It is not what I don’t know that keeps me up at night. It’s all the things I don’t know I don’t know because I think I do.” A Zen master couldn’t say it better or design a better koan.

It is axiomatic to leadership that most of our limitations are self-imposed, and that is why the IBM Executive School under my mentor, Louis R. Mobley, was a place where unlearning rather than learning took place.

I migrated to North Carolina in 1985 to join a software start-up founded by a 26-year-old college dropout, and his syrupy southern drawl betrayed his humble “country” upbringing. When he came up with his idea for a company, he jumped on a plane for New York and began cold calling venture capitalists determined to raise money or max out his credit card. He returned to North Carolina two weeks later with several million dollars.